The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  side, the sun; on the top of the Cross, the letters I.H.S.; on the

  left arm, a man and woman dancing, with an effort to delineate the

  female's dress; under which, initials.' Another seaman 'had, on

  the lower part of the right arm, the device of a sailor and a

  female; the man holding the Union Jack with a streamer, the folds

  of which waved over her head, and the end of it was held in her

  hand. On the upper part of the arm, a device of Our Lord on the

  Cross, with stars surrounding the head of the Cross, and one large

  star on the side in Indian Ink. On the left arm, a flag, a true

  lover's knot, a face, and initials.' This tattooing was found

  still plain, below the discoloured outer surface of a mutilated

  arm, when such surface was carefully scraped away with a knife. It

  is not improbable that the perpetuation of this marking custom

  among seamen, may be referred back to their desire to be

  identified, if drowned and flung ashore.

  It was some time before I could sever myself from the many

  interesting papers on the table, and then I broke bread and drank

  wine with the kind family before I left them. As I brought the

  Coast-guard down, so I took the Postman back, with his leathern

  wallet, walking-stick, bugle, and terrier dog. Many a heart-broken

  letter had he brought to the Rectory House within two months many;

  a benignantly painstaking answer had he carried back.

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  As I rode along, I thought of the many people, inhabitants of this

  mother country, who would make pilgrimages to the little churchyard

  in the years to come; I thought of the many people in Australia,

  who would have an interest in such a shipwreck, and would find

  their way here when they visit the Old World; I thought of the

  writers of all the wreck of letters I had left upon the table; and

  I resolved to place this little record where it stands.

  Convocations, Conferences, Diocesan Epistles, and the like, will do

  a great deal for Religion, I dare say, and Heaven send they may!

  but I doubt if they will ever do their Master's service half so

  well, in all the time they last, as the Heavens have seen it done

  in this bleak spot upon the rugged coast of Wales.

  Had I lost the friend of my life, in the wreck of the Royal

  Charter; had I lost my betrothed, the more than friend of my life;

  had I lost my maiden daughter, had I lost my hopeful boy, had I

  lost my little child; I would kiss the hands that worked so busily

  and gently in the church, and say, 'None better could have touched

  the form, though it had lain at home.' I could be sure of it, I

  could be thankful for it: I could be content to leave the grave

  near the house the good family pass in and out of every day,

  undisturbed, in the little churchyard where so many are so

  strangely brought together.

  Without the name of the clergyman to whom - I hope, not without

  carrying comfort to some heart at some time - I have referred, my

  reference would be as nothing. He is the Reverend Stephen Roose

  Hughes, of Llanallgo, near Moelfra, Anglesey. His brother is the

  Reverend Hugh Robert Hughes, of Penrhos, Alligwy.

  CHAPTER III - WAPPING WORKHOUSE

  My day's no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had

  turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving

  Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my

  idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my

  little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one

  leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and had got past

  Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head (with an

  ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy

  countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient

  neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I

  don't know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don't know where;

  and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got

  past Whitechapel Church, and was - rather inappropriately for an

  Uncommercial Traveller - in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly

  wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly

  enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar

  refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back

  streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans

  lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops

  where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that

  I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to

  use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards

  Wapping.

  Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I

  was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don't)

  in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover,

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  to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same,

  since she gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name; I am

  afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was

  frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an

  Eastern police magistrate had said, through the morning papers,

  that there was no classification at the Wapping workhouse for

  women, and that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers other

  hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really stood.

  For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men

  of the East, may be inferred from their course of procedure

  respecting the fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St.

  George's in that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the matter

  at issue, in a state of mind betokening the weakest perplexity,

  with all parties concerned and unconcerned, and, for a final

  expedient, to consult the complainant as to what he thinks ought to

  be done with the defendant, and take the defendant's opinion as to

  what he would recommend to be done with himself.

  Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my

  way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish

  frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or

  other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I

  had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter,

  I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in

  some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely in

  the likeness of a young man, with a puffed sallow face, and a

  figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the

  youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man

  about whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large

  thimble, that stood between us.

  I asked this apparition what it called the place? Unto which, it

  replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurgling water in its

  throat:

  'Mr. Baker's trap.'

  As it is a point of great sensitiveness with m
e on such occasions

  to be equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I

  deeply considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the

  apparition - then engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron

  bar at the top of the locks. Inspiration suggested to me that Mr.

  Baker was the acting coroner of that neighbourhood.

  'A common place for suicide,' said I, looking down at the locks.

  'Sue?' returned the ghost, with a stare. 'Yes! And Poll.

  Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane;' he sucked the iron between

  each name; 'and all the bileing. Ketches off their bonnets or

  shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a

  headerin' down here, they is. Like one o'clock.'

  'And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?'

  'Ah!' said the apparition. 'THEY an't partickler. Two 'ull do for

  THEM. Three. All times o' night. On'y mind you!' Here the

  apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a

  sarcastic manner. 'There must be somebody comin'. They don't go a

  headerin' down here, wen there an't no Bobby nor gen'ral Cove, fur

  to hear the splash.'

  According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a

  General Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which

  modest character I remarked:

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  'They are often taken out, are they, and restored?'

  'I dunno about restored,' said the apparition, who, for some occult

  reason, very much objected to that word; 'they're carried into the

  werkiss and put into a 'ot bath, and brought round. But I dunno

  about restored,' said the apparition; 'blow THAT!' - and vanished.

  As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to

  find myself alone, especially as the 'werkiss' it had indicated

  with a twist of its matted head, was close at hand. So I left Mr.

  Baker's terrible trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy

  rinsing of sooty chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse

  gate, where I was wholly unexpected and quite unknown.

  A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in her

  hand, responded to my request to see the House. I began to doubt

  whether the police magistrate was quite right in his facts, when I

  noticed her quick, active little figure and her intelligent eyes.

  The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first.

  He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all

  was.

  This was the only preparation for our entering 'the Foul wards.'

  They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved

  yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of

  the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the

  time - a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient

  and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and only

  accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted

  for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.

  A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a

  change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage

  of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively

  observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of

  expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity

  of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up

  and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for

  ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow,

  looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a

  little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and

  indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every

  pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a

  word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came

  into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world.

  No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who

  could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done

  there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their

  suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The

  wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such

  rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if

  they were ill-kept.

  I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into

  a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. There

  was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards

  had been like sides of school-boys' bird-cages. There was a strong

  grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either

  side of the hearth, separated by the breadth of this grating, were

  two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was surely

  the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency to be found

  in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently jealous of

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  each other, and passed their whole time (as some people do, whose

  fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, and

  contemptuously watching their neighbours. One of these parodies on

  provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative, and expressed a

  strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from which she

  represented herself to have derived the greatest interest and

  consolation when allowed that privilege. She gossiped so well, and

  looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think

  this a case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the

  last occasion of her attending chapel she had secreted a small

  stick, and had caused some confusion in the responses by suddenly

  producing it and belabouring the congregation.

  So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the grating -

  otherwise they would fly at one another's caps - sat all day long,

  suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits. For

  everybody else in the room had fits, except the wards-woman; an

  elderly, able-bodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air

  of repressing and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands

  folded before her, and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for

  catching or holding somebody. This civil personage (in whom I

  regretted to identify a reduced member of my honourable friend Mrs.

  Gamp's family) said, 'They has 'em continiwal, sir. They drops

  without no more notice than if they was coach-horses dropped from

  the moon, sir. And when one drops, another drops, and sometimes

  there'll be as many as four or five on 'em at once, dear me, a

  rolling and a tearin', bless you! - this young woman, now, has 'em

  dreadful bad.'

  She turned up this young woman's face with her hand as she said it.

  This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the

  foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in

  her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy

  and hysteria were about her,
but she was said to be the worst here.

  When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face

  turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in upon

  her.

  - Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely

  troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way,

  ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of

  healthy people and healthy things? Whether this young woman,

  brooding like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere

  there are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea?

  Whether, not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim

  revelation of that young woman - that young woman who is not here

  and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and loved,

  and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who

  never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon

  her? And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up

  then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?

  I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating

  into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful

  to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world was

  not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman

  was a child not long ago, and a child not long hence might be such

  as she. Howbeit, the active step and eye of the vigilant matron

  conducted me past the two provincial gentlewomen (whose dignity was

  ruffled by the children), and into the adjacent nursery.

  There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young

  mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young

  mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not

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  appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have

  been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft

  faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure

  of giving a poetical commission to the baker's man to make a cake

  with all despatch and toss it into the oven for one red-headed

  young pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it. Without

  that refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition for

  'the Refractories,' towards whom my quick little matron - for whose

  adaptation to her office I had by this time conceived a genuine